Danzy Senna's New People Explores Race, Love, and Gentrification

In her latest novel, New People (Riverhead), Danzy Senna bores into the dynamics of race, identity, heritage, poverty, and privilege in contemporary America, exposing the pride and promises of change therein, as well as the pitfalls and pathologies. Agile and ambitious, the novel is also a wild-hearted romance about secrets and obsessions, a dramedy of manners about the educated black middle-class—the "talented tenth"—that is Senna's authorial home ground. One critic, in reviewing Senna's 2009 memoir, Where Did You Sleep Last Night?, about her writer parents' marriage and divorce, and her father's disappearance from her life, called her trenchant observations on America's fixation with race "nod-inducingly brilliant."

That brilliance is on display in New People. Senna herself is mixed-race—her mother, a poet, is white and a Boston blue blood; her father, a poet, author, professor, and editor, is of African American and Mexican heritage. Senna first claimed this narrative territory as a 28-year-old in her breakout best-selling 1998 novel, Caucasia, which won multiple awards and quickly became required reading on English and African American college-course syllabi.

The female protagonist of New People, Maria, shares some of Senna's biographical outlines: Maria refers to herself as a "quadroon" adopted and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by a single mom, Gloria, who struggled for years but never was able to complete her dissertation at Harvard. Maria meets Khalil—who "grew up in a liberal, humanist, multiracial family, oblivious to his own blackness," when they are students at Stanford—after he'd broken up with his white girlfriend. "Maria liked to joke that she was his transitional object," Senna writes. "He was morphing into a race man before her very eyes."

Now it is 1996, and they're engaged and living together in a gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood. "Interspersed among the old guard—the Jamaican ladies with their folding chairs, the churchy men in their brown polyester suits—are the ones who have just arrived. It is subtle, this shift, almost imperceptible. When Maria blurs her eyes right it doesn't appear to be happening. They dance together at house parties in the dark. If I ruled the world they sing, their voices rising as one, Imagine that. I'd free all my sons."

Maria is trying to finish her PhD dissertation on the ethnomusicological component of Jim Jones's ill-fated Peoples Temple, while Khalil pursues his dream of establishing a successful community-building start-up. They are also the featured couple in a documentary being filmed about the blending and intermingling of races by a Scandinavian filmmaker who believes that "a new race will be born from these New People."

Danzy Senna

Mara Casey

Inconveniently, as wedding plans shape up, Maria becomes obsessed with a tall black poet she meets at a reading with Khalil and his younger sister, Lisa. "The thought of him makes her not so much relax as it seems to transport her, electrified, to a secret, happy place.… The light in the scenes that play in her mind is grainy and muted, like clips from an old movie…maybe Klute. She imagines them together inside one of those movies, where the women had real faces and drooping, small breasts and the men were dirty and sly."

Senna is a master at unmasking the conflicted psyches as well as the societal pressures of her high-achieving yet vulnerable characters. Midnovel, Maria acts on her fantasies about the poet in an elaborate and unsettling episode that involves a case of mistaken identity, a random baby, an open window, a fire escape, and an artisanal bottle of beer. Later, she tries to free herself from her lust for him by examining, in the dusky late-afternoon light, the diamond and sapphire engagement ring on her finger from Khalil. "It looks like somebody else's hand, a woman she would like to become someday. A fiancée. The hand of a special somebody.… The ring is evidence that she is a part of this tribe—herself, Khalil, Lisa, their friends—a tangle of mud-colored New People who have come to carry the nation—blood-soaked, guilty of everything of which it has been accused—into the future."

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